Pages

Modular

Posts related to modular products:
9/10/12

Overview of Agilent's New M9381A PXI Vector Signal Generator

The following video gives a great overview of Agilent's new M9381A PXI Vector Signal Generator. The M9381A delivers Agilent quality and performance in the PXI form factor. The M9381A is blazing fast with 10 us switching speed, provides 160 MHz of RF modulation bandwidth, and better than +/- 0.4 dB amplitude accuracy.

The below video provides an overview of Agilent's M9703A mult-channel 12-bit high-speed digitizer based on the AXIe standard. The M9703A is a wideband digitizer, providing 4 or 8 synchronous channels with 12-bit resolution, each running at up to 3.2 GS/s, and offering up to 1 GHz analog bandwidth. The Agilent M9703A also provides very long acquisition capability by implementing up to 4 GBytes internal memory. In addition, to ensure high data throughput, the module also provides a PCIe backplane connection. Overall this is a pretty awesome instrument!

Below is a video demonstrating Agilent's M9018A PXI Monitoring Tools. The monitoring tools allow you to easily monitor and control things like power rail voltages, individual module slot temperatures, and fan speeds inside the mainframe. These chassis monitoring tools give you the ability to ensure reliable and repeatable results in your PXI testing environment. The monitoring tools features can be accessed via a rich set of IVI commands allowing you to take advantages of the tools in almost any programming environment including C#, Matlab, and Labview.

Below is a video demonstrating how Agilent's M9183A PXI DMM is over 10 times faster in a transactional test setup compared to Brand X's PXI DMM (you can probably guess who Brand X is). Transactional testing refers to automated test setups where the DMM and switching has to be reconfigured for each measurement or test point on the DUT. That means at each test point the DMM is configured, armed (*INIT command), and the measurement is fetched from memory into the test software.Everything in the test is the same except the DMMs so each test setup has the same switching, same PXI chassis, same code, and the DMM measurement aperture time is the same. Check out the video below.

The reason that Brand X's DMM is so much slower is because its measurement arming time is ~ 6 ms! Agilent's M9183A measurement arming time is < 100 us. With an arm time of 6 ms Brand X is wasting the benefit gained by the high speed PXI bus. In fact, with such a large arm time a 'box' DMM using USB, LAN, or GPIB is faster. For instance Agilent's 34410A DMM takes only ~ 2 ms to make a measurement (that is including IO latency).

On 3/2/11 Agilent introduced the creme da la creme of arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) with the M8190A. The M8190A offers ultra wide bandwidth and high resolution -- simultaneously. The M8190A offers sampling rates up to 8 GS/s at 14-bits of resolution and 12 GS/s at 16-bits of resolution.

The M8190A is a modular instrument for the AXIe standard. The AXIe standard was created in November of 2009. The three founding members are Aeroflex Corporation, Agilent Technologies Inc., and Test Evolution Corporation (for more info on AXIe click here). The M190A is targeted at applications such as radar, satellite comms, electronic warfare, ADC testing, and jitter margin testing. The following is a list of the M8190A's specs:

Variable sample rate from 125 MSa/s to 8 / 12 GS/s

Spurious-free-dynamic range (SFDR) up to 80 dBc typical

Harmonic distortion (HD) up to -72 dBc typical

Up to 2 GS arbitrary waveform memory per channel with advanced sequencing

Today at Autotestcon Agilent is launching the largest modular instrument introduction in test and measurement history! Agilent is introducing 47 products in both PXI and AXIe (more on AXIe form factor click here), with the bulk being in PXI. The products range from RF switches to pulse pattern generators to DMMs. If we rewind back a couple decades, Agilent was the pioneer in modular instrumentation with their extensive VXI portfolio. While still staying in the modular instrumentation arena, over the last decade they focused more on high accuracy ‘box’ instruments. With this introduction it is clear that Agilent plans on playing a bigger role in the modular instrumentation industry. You can see a list of Agilent’s modular instrument introductions in the top figure (click on it to enlarge).

Since this is a GPETE blog I wanted to fill you in on the details on Agilent’s new PXI DMM family. The family consists of the M9182A (shown in lower figure) and the M9183A. Both are 6.5 digit DMMs, the M9183A provides higher speed performance and added features. Here is a quick rundown on specs and features:

Surprisingly there are not really many PXI DMMs out there. National Instruments is by far the leader in this space with about 90% of the PXI DMM market so Agilent has an uphill battle. If you’re a consumer of PXI DMMS this is good news! Fierce competition means lower prices, more promotions, and more innovation for you as the end user. For more info on Agilent’s new PXI DMMs see the links below.